Sarah Davies

Today’s interview is with Willow Brugh. Willow is a community organizer, a scholar on the subject of transhumanism, and is a currently developing a multi-discipline maker space in Seattle called Jigsaw Renaissance .

Sarah: What is a hacker space, and how can it change the world?
Willow: Hacker spaces are communal places of tools and loud noises. They are a place to take things apart without fear of being reprimanded, a place to afix together a Frankenstein’s Monster of tech that makes you giggle madly at the thought of it working. Hacker spaces are a sort of gateway into exploring everything. By encouraging the taking apart of “closed” objects – things that have been marketed to us as inaccessible and to be left for the experts – we can begin to form mindsets which make exploration and understanding necessary joys in life. Anything which was considered “off limits” becomes a puzzle to figure out and do better. This includes politics, education systems, personal relationships, and anything else one might consider. Hacker spaces are the speakeasys in a culture that demands experts for even the most trivial situation.

Sarah: Do you think our generation has a fundamentally different concept of communication from previous generations? How does our communication style change the way we interact with each other?
Willow: I believe every generation has a different way of communicating than the ones before them. Ours is more radical, yes, but the next generation will be even more so. Asynchronous, documentable conversation leads to more self-reflection (it’s difficult to read a letter you’ve sent to someone across the country, unless you made a copy for yourself, but now we can read old chat logs and sent e-mails) and a revisiting of ideas. Our memories – once hazy, slightly shared, mostly constructed ideas of past events – are now clearly defined through stored chats and phone photos. We share our memories with people who weren’t there. While our perspectives and intents remain fluid, our shared experience becomes more solid.
We can also now hold conversations with a multitude of people, with timing as little issue and geography even less so. I believe that while this has a tendency to spread the psyche a bit thinner than in the past, it’s similar to laying on a bed of many small nails… much more supportive than fewer, albeit larger, connection points.

Sarah: It seems to me that it’s harder now than ever before to be “in the closet” about anything. How have generation y conceptions of privacy changed social, academic, and office dynamics?
Willow: The American desire and demand to be revered as an individual makes being in the closet about anything less appealing than remaining inside. Many of the people I know, myself included, treat social media as something to be used responsibly and with an eye to privacy, but also as social space. If someone goes looking for questionable pictures on your Facebook, it’s similar to your boss visiting a bar they’ve heard you frequent to see how you behave. There is much more acknowledgment that many individuals put on their cog costume for enough time to support the lifestyle and activities they truly enjoy. More and more successful companies realize their employees are a wide range of eclectic individuals, and enhance their businesses through relishing that fact.

Sarah: How will embeddable (embeddable in flesh, that is) computers change the way we live?
Willow: I like to explain it in terms of oxygen tech and opaque tech. Oxygen technology is stuff you use without having to think about it. Opaque tech you notice every little thing involving that piece. When my phone is on vibrate and in my pocket, and someone texts me while I’m having a face-to-face conversation with someone else, while I know I’ve received a text, that knowledge doesn’t detract at all from my attention to the person I’m conversing with. Having a ringer on would disrupt the conversation – it’s opaque. I have to interact with it in a very obvious manner in order to process the information it’s giving me. Having embeddable technology is like that pocket vibration. You don’t have to notice it much to make a lot of use of the information it gives you. It’s in your peripheral mind’s eye. In short, we’ll be processing a lot more information without having to pay as much conscious attention to it.

Sarah: How do you motivate community and face-to-face interaction between people who primarily live their lives online?
Willow: Where2.0 is doing a very good job with this, and augmented reality will fill the gap. As we tag our physical environments, create point systems based on interacting with them, augment the reality we have at hand, the line between online and meatspace slowly goes away. We’ve always been impacting our environment with constructed signs and shaping it with our tools… we’re just continuing in that direction. Maybe someday I’ll talk to a hologram (or HUD display) of a friend across the globe. Maybe a geographically local friend will hand me a link to her new favorite book while we play chess at a tea shop. I think the important thing is the connectivity and the respect we give people we care about.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community.

Photo credit: Libby Bulloff

I went to Seattle GreenDrinks a few months back and Grist was there asking everyone what they love!

My boy Brian Rowe.

That’s my friend Gregory Heller from CivicActions showing some Obamalove.

The full set is up on Flickr. If it looks like the room keeps changing, that’s because it was actually held in a new condo building in several adjacent identical condos.

I don’t think I’ll be back to Greendrinks. I appreciate what they are doing, but the smug-white-people quotient was a little too high for me. They really should have called this photoset Stuff White People Love. (If you haven’t checked out Stuff White People Like, you have hours of laughter ahead of you.)

The last school we visited in seeking a new place for the geekling was Perkins School. They have an experiential learning program that involves lots of reenactment and hands-on activities. The grade levels are typically a year ahead of public schools, which we appreciated.

It was also the only private school we visited that included children with learning disabilities. These children are held to the same standards as the others, but they each have a personal teacher to help them with classroom tasks. Awesome!

They incorporate a lot of science into the curriculum, with iMacs in every classroom, gardening, checking the weather, and taking care of animals.

Overall, we were impressed with the school. We will apply and see what happens.

We’re looking for a new school for the geekling, and I’m blogging the whole fascinating process. If you missed it, installment one was the black-crayon-banning Seattle Waldorf School.

This week we toured a small independent school on first hill in Seattle called Giddens School.

Giddens School was recommended to me by my colleague Leah Lee, who used to work there. She had endless praise for all the faculty and staff there, so I went in with extremely high expectations.

We first met in the library, which is a cozy little room on the top floor. It’s like a maze with creaky floors and book lined alcoves ideal for children looking to lose themselves in the wonders of reading. Our guide asked us what other tours we had been on. We told a more diplomatic version of our Waldorf experience. She seemed casual and sincere, which was a pretty big departure from the nervous and approval-seeking guides at other schools.

The guide explained that everything at Giddens revolves around their mission of social justice. This immediately impressed me. I do technology work for nonprofits because I believe that I can change the world for the better, and it’s very important for me to be able to instill that feeling in the geekling.

We went on a classroom tour, and they actually encouraged us to talk to the kids (who were all very excited to show us their work, and passionate in their love for school). Traditional academics appear to be strong there, though not spectacular. The kids get Spanish for half an hour twice a week. It’s not an immersion program, so I would guess that they come out of 5th grade exposed heavily to Spanish, but far from fluent. The music program is run by a local musician who writes social-justice oriented songs for the kids and runs an after-school choir. Each classroom has three desktop computers set aside for the kids to work on spelling, word processing, and educational games.

The kids at Giddens have a “secret garden” where they grow food. They then put the food into little red wagons and haul it over to the food bank across the street. They also plan meals for hundreds of people at the senior center down the block as one of their math projects. One of the teachers told us about how the fourth grade class implemented a postal system for the school where they sell stamps and deliver letters and packages for people. They then employed a democratic process to decide what to do with the money earned by the postal system, and ended up donating it to a local park to help them make their play structures more diverse so that kids of all ages and sizes could play there. The school has a student council which influences the decisions of the administration. Each class has representatives elected to the council.

I was very impressed by the amount of exposure that kids get to public service, democracy, and activism. After the tour, we spoke with the principal. He was very passionate about child development, and we were able to have a great conversation with him over when it’s developmentally appropriate to expose kids to things like hunger and poverty, and how to expose them in a way that inspires optimism and activism rather than cynicism and inaction.

The level of conversation that I was able to engage in with the students, teachers, and administration was orders of magnitude above the other schools we have talked to. They were open, honest, sincere, and genuinely dedicated to inspiring children to be active adult citizens.

We will definitely be applying to Giddens, and I suspect that we will become active and passionate members of the Giddens community come next year (if we can afford to!).

The geekling’s three other parents and I have been looking at different schools for her in Seattle. It’s been an interesting process. So interesting, in fact, that it’s (you guessed it) bloggable.

The first parent tour we went on was the Seattle Waldorf School, and boy are they a trip! We had some idea of the Waldorf curriculum going in. We dutifully read the full-color glossy book they had sent to our house a few weeks earlier. We’d poked around the website. We liked the idea that the kids have the same class and teacher through all of 1st-8th grade. We liked the idea of a well-researched, pre-set curriculum. The geekling is in Suzuki violin, after all, so we’re no stranger to strict lesson plans with lots of parent involvement.

We got there and were taken to the music room (all Waldorf kids learn to play violin, so it was stuffed with string instruments), and encouraged to look at laminated books of classroom work produced by different grade levels. The very polite and perky admissions officer told us that these books contained the best work produced by Waldorf students. She seemed to think this was something to be proud of. It sounded more to us like an apologetic admission that not all of their students produce this level of work.

Read the rest of this entry »

I presented this talk at the “Best of Ignite” session at Gnomedex 8.0. I’ve also posted the slides, transcript, and feedback.

Here’s the ogg download of the video for all my freedom-loving readers!

Thanks to everyone who saw my Gnomedex talk and gave me positive feedback. I really enjoyed watching the other presenters as well. I’ll put up the video when I get it, but for now, here are the slides and the (intended) transcript. Much of the original content got cut on the fly to save on time.

This presentation is dedicated to the Public Domain. It may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

So, last week I donated $8.34 some guy running for state congress in Kansas. I’ve never been to Kansas. I don’t much care about what happens in Kansas, but this guy, Sean Tevis made a webcomic that got carried on a blog that I read. You might have heard of it. It’s called BoingBoing.

When I read the comic, I knew that it could only have been made by a geek; it was clear that Sean Tevis and I shared common sacred knowledge as citizens of cyberspace. I knew he must be part of my tribe, and if he shares the values of my tribe, then by god, that man is qualified to fix Kansas.

Sean Tevis raised nearly $100,000 from more than 5,000 people (only about 6,000 people voted in his district last year). And this made me think that we as geeks need to own our buying power, we need to own our political and technological power, and we need to take over the world.

We must employ Tevisian economics throughout the square states and the bible belt, infiltrating decision-making bodies nationwide with our gold-farming, youtube making kin. The economic power of the tech-savvy coasts will woo the votes of the advertising-addicted drones in the middle states.

It is common geek knowledge that lotteries are merely a tax on those who can’t do math. So once we have a geek majority firmly in place, we must repeal all gambling laws and drain the wallets of all statistics challenged Americans, of whom I have been informed there are a large number.

This will provide a huge budget surplus for our new geektatorship, our glorious geekocracy. With these enormous piles of cash, we will wage a global battle, an epic game of risk, pitting luddite against linux programmer, corn farmer against gold farmer. Human casualties are a very serious matter,

so the first step in the plan is to pick select non-geeky cities across the globe and send in an army of remote controlled lego robots. Each robot will have a spy cam and gps for remote navigation, as well as multiple processor-motor nodes throughout their body, so that even if they are dismantled, the individual parts can still be controlled autonomously.

Toward the end of this phase, we are basically expecting a swarm of various robot parts, which even if unarmed, will be able to climb to tall heights and then land on unsuspecting and now unconscious passers-by. We are confident that this will cause all people incapable of reprogramming the robots to flee for their lives.

With the people gone, we will need to clear a large flat area. This can be accomplished by printing out thousands of copies of the DMCA and using them as kindling to burn down the city. This has the added benefit of obscuring our location in smoke. Infrared googles will be provided.

Once we have cleared a secure a base, we’ll bring in Jimmy Wales to build wiki-barracks that can be quickly put up and taken down. Any buildings not considered “notable” or suspected of being built based on original research will have to be demolished.

Communications between bases must be dual key encrypted. Public keys will be projected onto the copious clouds of smoke via big green lasers. Disclosure of private keys will be punishable by a 24-hour suspension from both Twitter and GMail, certainly not something to be attempted by the faint of heart.

We will need Adrian from the RepRap project to create self replicating wifi routers which will spread themselves over the earth, providing infinite high bandwidth internet. We’ll have to lock down the network of course, SSID:fabulousbitches password:pwning your town.

Dan Kaminsky will be a double agent, pretending to secure enemy networks while in actuality causing all of their DNS information to point to a fail whale.Then it’s time for the attack! Ariana Huffington will swing into the enemy camp from the north on a cat5 cable and blog to death as many enemy combatants as possible,

but we’ll need some diversions so they don’t see her coming. To the east will be a text-message coordinated flashmob of cosplayers, to the south will be Randall Monroe publicly performing acts from his mistranslated Kama Sutra, and to the west will be Sarah Lacy in hot pants.

Now if this mission should fail because someone is too busy flirting with Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Stevens will be on hand to lead us through the underground tubes. At the end of the tubes will be Ron Paul’s blimp. It should have sufficient fuel on board, but in an emergency, we can fill it with Michael Arrington’s ego and escape unharmed.

There are always casualties associated with battle, and death from over-blogging is tragic. To ease the trauma, we will have chaplains available from the church of Richard Stallman. Burial expenses will be covered, or the family may opt to have a sculpture created from the ashes in the shape of Wil Wheaton’s head.

Compensation for bereaved loved ones will consist of free passes to Foo Camp and a linkback from Slashdot. You may not voluntarily sacrifice family members. You may however, sacrifice yourself for the pagerank of others.

Once we have captured the enemy, we will place them in a humane Matrix-like environment, where they will be under the impression that they have a larger SUV than all their neighbors. And THEN the geeks will inherit the earth.

Thank you very much. I’m Sarah Davies. You can read more of my work at sarahdavies.cc and freedomforip.org. I also have a panel proposal up at SxSW.

Feedback from the backchat:

<Elk> Sarah Davis?
<aPpLe_CiDeR> wow, one breath
<tsparks> I worked with her
<Elk> Woo! Public domain!
<Bouddha> Yay !!!
<Zeph> Yay open source
<MeLoveMe> fast…
<ustreamer-66034> you can’t say “happy” on this?
<Hammy> AWESOME
<Dmitri> someone had some coffee
<Fort> haha
<Kyle_vdk> hahaha
<Hammy> shes fast
<SuperPC> Yay
<McAppleMan> wow talks really fast
<MeLoveMe> i only understood a few words,lol
* Elk likes Ms. Davis already.
<eggy> yeah, lol
<Elk> “Geeks FTW!” lol
<Kyle_vdk> haha!
<MeLoveMe> yay for drawings
<SuperPC> lol
<Hammy> thats a drawing of chris i think
<Bouddha> lolll
<Bouddha> hahahah
<Kyle_vdk> hahahah
<Kyle_vdk> hahah!
* Elk doesn’t see anything on Arizona..
<Dmitri> sadly, I can’t even draw that well free hand
<Kyle_vdk> this is good.
<Hammy> d’oh!
<Kyle_vdk> hah!
<Bouddha> east coast and west coast must conquer Texas !!! XD
<Fort> woohoo
<SuperPC> D’OH
<Fort> She’s got my vote.
<Hammy> o.O
<Dmitri> humans..pfft
<Elk> This is being recorded, correct?
<Kyle_vdk> haha! she should go for president.
<SuperPC> She’s good
<Fort> Awesome, Lego robots!
<Hammy> nenotech
<McAppleMan> lol
<ustreamer-66034> (”’\(o;.;@)/”’)
<Bouddha> *Xkcd*
<moyoy> The uprising! Finally!
<Kyle_vdk> It is recorded.
<Fort> Go, Mighty Voltron!
<Hammy> haha
<Zeph> Kat, please upload this video first when you get home >.>
<Bouddha> this is so cool
<ustreamer-77144> what is this ?
<Bouddha> this is awsome
<Hammy> I want this to happen!
<Dmitri> this is Gnomedex
<moyoy> Oh, no!
<Kyle_vdk> Hahahah!
<Bouddha> yes
<MeLoveMe> Aplha squad form up and waypoint charley
<ustreamer-77144> Is this live ?
<Elk> lol, internet slang
<iConnor3G> she is really funny lol
<Bouddha> lets start a group on facebook
<Elk> ustreamer, yes
<Hammy> ROFL
<Bouddha> XD
<ustreamer-59963> yes ustreamer
<moyoy> I wouldn’t live
<Fort> Oh, that’s harsh!
<Kyle_vdk> hahha~
<Fort> 24 hours from GMail!
<Dmitri> I’m down for that
<iConnor3G> omg 24 hour suspension
<Elk> “Infinite High-Bandwidth Internet”?
<Bouddha> hehe
<ustreamer-59963> <censored>, why am i not logged in?
<Elle> When the chat is moderated only trusted (voiced) users may chat. Please see this link to learn how to become a voiced user: http://www.wyldryde.org/a/001217.php
<CCMike> ustreamer-59963 please stop that
<Hammy> people would kill themselves if they cant twitter for 24hrs
<iConnor3G> password = alpine
<Hammy> lol
<iConnor3G> lol
<SkyForce6> low volume…
<moyoy> rofl
<Elk> Woo! Cosplayers
<Hammy> YAAY
<Bouddha> i’m still not getting what Twitter is
<Hammy> hahahahaha
<Dmitri> I love this woman’s spunk
<ACE> What?!?!?
<Bouddha> hahaha
<Elk> Dang!
<Hammy> ouch!
<drisley> she’s awesome
<Elk> I flippin’ love Sarah
<Dmitri> yes she is
<Kyle_vdk> shes awesome!!!
<MeLoveMe> lol
<Hammy> yuppers
<Fort> <giggle>
<MeLoveMe> i like her idea
<JimBo>
<Bouddha> ghfa
<JimBo> kool
<MeLoveMe> lol
<Hammy> i wouldnt XD
<Fort> What about other people’s family members?
<Hammy> woot
<Bouddha> Yay !!
<Dmitri> amen sista!
<Bouddha> nice
<moyoy> yea!
<Elk> Sarah Davis for President!
* Hammy claps and cheers
<Kyle_vdk> Yes!
<Fort> Vote early, vote often!
* Kyle_vdk claps
<Elk> [Emphesis on 'Often']
<urmom> hi
<iConnor3G> lol
<urmom> hehe

I have accepted an invitation to speak this Friday at the Best of Ignite Seattle portion of Gnomedex 2008.

“Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility”

- Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work | 43 Folders

I will be giving a playful geeky talk called “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth”. It will be a lightning talk, which means I will have five minutes on stage and my slides will autoforward every 15 seconds. It will involve a lot of me talking very quickly and trying not to laugh.

Here’s a video of my first Ignite Seattle talk in February 2007:

I will be posting my slides and a transcript of the presentation directly afterward.

That would be a robot toaster bunny enjoying last week’s snow. Thanks for beautifying Seattle, toast!